Better riding #1
Just a few extra comments on the better riding article in the December issue, after thinking further on it and reflecting on experiences from my highways industry career going back over 40 years.
There was quite a bit of text devoted to ‘reading the road’, looking at signs, hedgerows, walls, telegraph poles, etc., but not a single mention of the white lines. For decades now, the white lines on our roads have been used to identify upcoming hazards on our roads – and understanding the lines can help make you both a safer and quicker rider – and white line schemes are based on a combination of road speed, obstacles/hazards and visibility distances.
As a general rule, short lines with longer gaps indicated a road where there are no (or less) immediate hazards. Where the lines change to a longer line and shorter gap, this usually means either an upcoming junction (possibly obscured), a loss of visibility (like a hump, or dip, in the road), or a corner. The longer the line and shorter the gap, the greater the hazard (there are various lengths of line and gap used, depending on the severity of the hazard/ situation).
Solid/unbroken white lines around a corner start at the point where the visibility distance decreases to the minimum safe level for the speed of traffic on the road and they change back to broken lines once the visibility distance around the corner has opened up and increased to a safe distance (and to indicate that visibility is sufficient to consider overtaking manoeuvres).
This is just touching the tip of the iceberg about what white lines can teach us about the road we’re looking forward to, but it seems that it’s all too often overlooked in rider training and riding tips. Perhaps Neil and Niall could consider/ research this and include it in future better rider articles – it’s not an exact science for the road user, but every bit of information or skill in reading a road will undoubtedly help keep us all riding longer and safer. Dean Welburn
Bertie says: “Thanks for this Dean! We touched upon white lines in a caption, but there’s so much to try and fit in just one feature.”